Animals & Nature
Bees & Pollinators Deep Dive Quiz
They pollinate 75% of our food crops â and they're disappearing.
They pollinate 75% of our food crops â and they're disappearing.
Without pollinators, roughly one-third of every bite of food you eat would vanish â along with an estimated $235 to $577 billion in annual global crop value. This quiz draws from a pool of 50 questions covering honeybee colony life, pollination science, colony collapse disorder, bee diversity, and the surprising world of non-bee pollinators like bats, beetles, and hummingbirds.
Each round presents 10 randomized questions from our pool of 50, so no two sessions are the same. Choose from four multiple-choice answers, get instant feedback with expert explanations, and share your score to challenge friends and family.
Questions span honeybee biology, the waggle dance, pollination economics, threats facing bees, the 20,000+ wild bee species most people never hear about, and the other animals that keep our ecosystems running. You might discover that bats pollinate agave (making tequila possible) or that bees can recognize human faces.
Bee populations are declining due to a combination of factors: the Varroa destructor mite (the single greatest threat to managed honeybee colonies), neonicotinoid pesticides that impair bee navigation and immunity, habitat loss from urbanization and monoculture farming, and climate change disrupting bloom timing. U.S. beekeepers have reported annual colony losses of 30-40% in recent years.
No. Of the more than 20,000 bee species worldwide, only a handful produce honey in meaningful quantities. The western honeybee (Apis mellifera) is the primary honey producer. Most bee species are solitary, meaning they do not live in colonies or produce honey. Bumblebees store small amounts of nectar but nothing like the surplus honeybees create.
Honeybees communicate primarily through the waggle dance, discovered by Karl von Frisch (who won the Nobel Prize in 1973 for his work). A forager performs a figure-eight dance on the comb: the angle relative to vertical indicates the direction of food relative to the sun, and the duration of the waggle run indicates distance. Bees also use pheromones extensively â the queen's mandibular pheromone controls colony behavior, and the alarm pheromone (which smells like bananas) alerts bees to threats.
Last updated: March 2026